8 New Books We Recommend This Week

Image

March 7, 2019

Among this week’s suggested titles are several that challenge conventional wisdom. In “They Were Her Property,” the Berkeley historian Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers dissects the unacknowledged ways that white women were avid participants in (and beneficiaries of) the American system of slavery. In “Empires of the Weak,” the Cambridge political scientist J. C. Sharman argues that Western supremacy has been a mere blip in the history of civilization, which has in fact been dominated by Asia and will be again. And in “Mama’s Last Hug,” the primatologist Frans de Waal builds the case that animals have emotional lives every bit as complex and rich as those of humans. If the intersection of science and culture and emotions piques your interest, you’ll also like William Davies’s “Nervous States,” which takes a wide-angle lens to our political moment and its attendant anxieties.

We also recommend Toni Morrison’s nonfiction collection “The Source of Self-Regard” and three novels: one set in Korea, one set in Syria, and one that hopscotches (in one heroine) from Elizabethan England to New York City in the early 2000s.

Gregory CowlesSenior Editor, BooksTwitter: @GregoryCowles

THEY WERE HER PROPERTY: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South,by Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers. (Yale, $30.) The full role of white women in slavery has long been one of the “slave trade’s best-kept secrets,” writes Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers. Her book examines how historians have misunderstood and misrepresented white women as reluctant actors. It is a “taut and cogent corrective,” our critic Parul Sehgal writes. “Jones-Rogers puts the matter plainly. White slave-owning women were ubiquitous. Not only did they profit from, and passionately defend, slavery, but the institution ‘was their freedom.’”

NERVOUS STATES: Democracy and the Decline of Reason,by William Davies. (Norton, $27.95.) Davies covers 400 years of intellectual history, technological innovation and economic development to examine how we’ve landed in our particular fraught and divisive political situation. He argues that we live in a state of profound uncertainty and heightened alertness. Hence the title of his book — referring not only to the anxiety that attends political life these days, but to the actual nervous system that mediates between body and mind. His work is “wide-ranging yet brilliantly astute,” our critic Jennifer Szalai writes. “Davies is a wild and surprising thinker who also happens to be an elegant writer.”

MAMA’S LAST HUG: Animal Emotions and What They Tell Us About Ourselves,by Frans de Waal. (Norton, $27.95.) De Waal argues that we make a grave mistake when we pretend that only humans think, feel and know, and cites neurochemical studies to conclude that feelings like love, anger and joy are widespread throughout the animal kingdom. Our reviewer, Sy Montgomery, calls “Mama’s Last Hug” a “game-changing new book” that “surprises us on almost every page.” By examining emotions in both humans and animals, Montgomery writes, de Waal “puts these most vivid of mental experiences in evolutionary context, revealing how their richness, power and utility stretch across species and back into deep time.”

THE WHITE BOOK,by Han Kang. Translated by Deborah Smith. (Hogarth, $20.) In this latest novel from the author of “The Vegetarian,” a Korean writer wanders the city of Warsaw, haunted by her family’s losses — and her country’s. “Resurrection is a theme throughout Han’s work, one that is tied up in political and collective memory,” Katie Kitamura notes in her review. “Among other things, ‘The White Book’ is an urgent plea for the ritual power of mourning — for its significance in terms of both personal and historical restitution.”

THE SOURCE OF SELF-REGARD: Selected Essays, Speeches, and Meditations,by Toni Morrison. (Knopf, $28.95.) Spanning four decades of Morrison’s illustrious career, this collection includes a stirring eulogy to James Baldwin, a prayer for the victims of 9/11 and insights into “Beloved” and her other novels. Reviewing it, James McBride writes that Morrison, who won the Nobel Prize in 1993, “has given every iota of her extraordinary American-born talent and intellect to the great American dream. Not the one with the guns and bombs bursting in air. The other one, the one with world peace, justice, racial harmony, art, literature, music and language that shows us how to be free wrapped in it. Morrison has, as they say in church, lived a life of service. Whatever awards and acclaim she has won, she has earned. She has paid in full. She owes us nothing. Yet even as she moves into the October of life, Morrison, quietly and without ceremony, lays another gem at our feet.”

DEATH IS HARD WORK,by Khaled Khalifa. Translated by Leri Price. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $25.) Khalifa’s fifth novel, about siblings reunited by their father’s death during Syria’s current war, wrestles with themes of societal demise and rejuvenation on a tableau every bit as haunted by violence as the swamps and red-clay roads of Faulkner’s South. “As the three siblings journey from Damascus to Anabiya,” Elliot Ackerman writes in his review, “we witness a terrain blighted by violence, but it’s also a terrain blighted by an accumulation of resentments, the millions of indignities suffered by a society forced to live under the scourge of authoritarianism and, now, civil war. At every checkpoint, every rest stop, every halt in traffic, there is another reminder of all that Abdel Latif’s family has endured.”

THE HEAVENS,by Sandra Newman. (Grove, $26.) This novel, which explores notions of time travel, romance and mental stability, features a heroine who comes to believe she lives simultaneously in Elizabethan England and 21st-century New York, with events in one period affecting life in the other. “In the end, there is no simple resolution to the way Kate has experienced her life,” Laura van den Berg writes, reviewing it. “The book is, blessedly, not about offering a diagnosis or unknotting the riddle of how Kate understands time; rather it is about illuminating the riddle itself. … This choice allows the novel to dwell in the luminous wilderness of the unsolvable. I woke from ‘The Heavens’ as I hope to emerge from any work of fiction: moved and unsettled, a new and intoxicating set of questions alight on the mind’s horizon.”

EMPIRES OF THE WEAK: The Real Story of European Expansion and the Creation of the New World Order,by J.C. Sharman. (Princeton, $27.95.) Taking in 1,000 years of history, Sharman makes the provocative case that European supremacy is a mere blip in mankind’s narrative, which is in fact dominated by Asia. It also argues that we are “on the cusp of a return to a more regular state of affairs, where the large states of Asia will again be the globe’s hegemons,” Alan Mikhail writes in his review. “As a critique of prevailing modes of thinking about global politics, ‘Empires of the Weak’ succeeds admirably. The history of international relations has focused too much on the most unrepresentative period of the last millennium — the century and a half in which Europe dominated the world. This weighting of the scales has skewed our understanding of global politics and the importance of the West. Sharman’s is a far richer story and one that perhaps more accurately reflects today’s global rebalancing.”